Although quite a lot has been written about PowerPivot and its features, there are certain aspects about PowerPivot that may not be obvious, especially to someone who is new to the tool. This articles discusses five such items.
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The issue of copyright for online scripts is a grey area. If a script is published without any form of copyright notice, most people assume that it is freely available for reuse. It's not necessarily the case.
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As an IT company, it is crucial that you maintain uptime and monitor the performance of various processes. By making database load balancing a key element, you can ensure that your processes and websites run smoothly. Tony Branson explains.
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In this free eBook, Kalen Delaney explains how Microsoft's new In-memory OLTP engine works. In her book, learn how to use lock- and latch-free data structures to allow non-blocking data processing, and find out how to migrate existing tables to Hekaton.
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You might think, as a developer, that nothing but the best is good enough as a development database. You might be mistaken. There is a lot to be said for LocalDB, but Ed Elliott argues that every edition has its pros and cons, and you need to consider Cloud-based resources, VMs and Containerised databases too. There is a whole range of alternatives and how you choose depends on the type of database you are developing, but for Ed, LocalDB gets the five-star accolade.
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Whether you are running an RDBMS, or a Big Data system, it is important to consider your data-partitioning strategy. As the volume of data grows, so it becomes increasingly important to match the way you partition your data to the way it is queried, to allow 'pruning' optimisation. When you have huge imports of data to consider, it can get complicated. Bartosz explains how to get things right; not perfect but wisely.
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What do you want to see more of on SQL Server Central? Anything you think we should get rid of? Let us know in this 17-question user survey, and at the end you can choose to be entered into a draw to win a $100 Amazon gift card. Thanks to everyone who's already answered, we greatly appreciate the feedback!
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